One of the two tennis courts at the Clark Field complex will be restriped and converted into four pickleball courts to accommodate growing interest in the sport, the Hermosa Beach City Council decided Tuesday evening.
The 3-1 vote, reflected the strength of a growing constituency for the racket sport, and an increasing effort by the city to allocate limited recreational space to diverse constituencies. Though played by people of all ages, pickleball is especially popular with senior citizens, who say the smaller court size makes the game less straining than tennis. Tuesday night’s meeting drew both recovering couch potatoes and former athletes, including John Hillebrand, who once took Arthur Ashe to five sets at Wimbledon.
“Consider what your yes vote will mean to seniors like me,” said Lois Tuey, a Hermosa resident and advocate for the sport. “It will give us an opportunity to maintain our mental health, our physical health.”
Pickleball was developed in the 1960s, and resembles both court and table tennis. It uses the surface of a tennis court, but with shorter nets. Players volley wiffle balls with composite rackets. The lines of a standard court are modified so that four pickleball courts can fit on an area roughly the size of one tennis court.
Finding local space to play has been a multi-year odyssey. Players currently have reserved time three days a week on temporary nets put up at paddle tennis courts in Manhattan Beach. But dozens of Hermosa devotees had sought courts closer to home.
In initial meetings of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission held more than two years ago, tennis players outnumbered pickleballers, making commissioners hesitant to dedicates space to the sport. But the situation reversed as pickleball players organized and gathered support. Over several Fridays in the fall of last year, the group partnered with Hermosa Five-O and set up taped pickleball lines on courts at the Community Center to gauge support, drawing a large turnout. After what commissioner Jani Lange described as extensive community outreach, commissioners later voted unanimously to support a pickleball court.
By Tuesday night’s meeting, council chambers were packed with pickleball advocates with only a people favoring maintaining the tennis courts. One tennis player, sensing the shift in momentum, said he felt “like the Lorax speaking for the trees.”
As part of the proposal, city staff studied usage rates of the city’s tennis courts. The city currently has eight courts: six at the Community Center and two at Clark Field, which are commonly known as the Kelley Courts. According to the staff study the western court at Clark was the least used, leading to the recommendation to convert that space for use by pickleball.
Whether “least used” meant uncrowded, however, was a point of disagreement. Councilmember Carolyn Petty, the lone no vote on the proposal, blamed the apparent disparity in support on a failure to organize by tennis players, saying that her experience was that courts in the city were constantly full. She argued that felt the city should accommodate pickleball with temporary courts, as Manhattan has done.
“To lose a tennis court would be a sad thing,” Petty said.
But the rest of the council disagreed, saying the council had an obligation to recognize shifting recreational trends. Councilmember Hany Fangary pointed out that, according to research from the Southern California Association of Governments, people over 45 have overtaken 25-to-35-year-olds as the largest demographic cohort in the city. And Mayor pro tem Jeff Duclos analogized the city’s decision more than a decade ago to remove a Community Center court to make way for the Hermosa skate park. Just as skating needed a municipal push to gain legitimacy, he said it was now pickleball’s turn for recognition.
“[Tennis] is not an underserved recreational activity. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now,” Duclos said.
